Brian Simoneau

Mercy

          —St. Mawes Castle, Cornwall


The moat beneath us gone to garden, sea rose
and Cornish heather, the old guardhouse peddling
ice cream and trinkets, we crouch through a doorframe
and notice wood and stone engraved to flatter
the king whose coffers built this little fortress
protecting the harbor and its deep-water
inland passage. A stairway curls down the wall
and a hole in the floor makes my daughter scream:
iron grate replaced with glass, an oubliette
filled by a figure looking up, a model
of longing, replica of mercies withheld.
There are so many ways to fail at this, day
after day so many ways I fail to see
coming. It’s a statue, I say, he’s not real,
but what echoes up the shaft of history
is hunger, is thirst, is skittishness at rats
in darkness, at dripping water, at the snarl
of a storm and the quiet that comes after,
as back outside—beyond stone walls eight feet thick,
beyond flowering ditch, beyond batteries
and blockhouse—the sunlight crackles off water,
boats slipping past us in every direction.

Brian Simoneau is the author of the poetry collections No Small Comfort (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and River Bound (C&R Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, Conduit, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, and other journals. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, he lives near Boston with his family.